Incredible Rediscovered Lost Cities

Tales of lost cities have captured the hearts and minds of explorers for millennia. In the search for the mysterious Atlantis, thousands upon thousands of hours have been sunk into investigations, research, and expeditions. Likewise, in pursuit of El Dorado, Spanish conquistadors braved the dense jungles and deadly wildlife of the Amazon, all in hope of catching a glimpse of the legendary city of gold.

While all attempts to find these two mythical cities have understandably come up empty-handed, many others have resulted in incredible discoveries. Today we’re going to cover five spectacular cities that were once lost to the sands of time, but have since been rediscovered.

Calakmul

In the late 1920s, an American Botanist named Cyrus Lundell left his home in New York to travel to central America, where he would be carrying out experiments for the Tropical Plant Research Foundation.

But little did he know that his legacy would soon have nothing to do with botany and the sapodilla trees he was researching. Lundell, who had a keen interest in archaeology, was given some information from a pair of locals that a massive, largely untouched city of ruins lay deep within the jungle of the Yucatan Peninsula. Later that year, he took to the skies, and while flying over the Mexican state of Campeche, he struck gold.

Poking out of the dense treetop were two stone structures, only visible from his bird’s eye view. He reported the finding, and named the place Calakmul, stemming from Mayan roots meaning “two adjacent temples”.

The site’s remoteness made it difficult to visit, but several expeditions were undertaken over the coming decades, and what they uncovered was nothing short of extraordinary. In and around Calakmul researchers have identified 8 significant structures, 8 different causeways, more than 100 stelae, or standing stone obelisks, 9 royal tombs, and well as hundreds of other artifacts, including elaborate ceramic plates, wall paintings, and much more.

Using all of this, as well as clues picked up from other regional discoveries, archaeologists have been able to paint a vibrant picture of the history of this lost Mayan city. The area was first settled, and was quite populated, as long ago as 1000 BC, but details are a bit muddy until around 600 AD, which is when the Mayans here began keeping extensive records on their ruling lineage, known as the Snake Kings.

During their time on the throne, they fought a generations-long war against the Tikal, a kingdom to their south. And while Calakmul usually came out of these conflicts victorious, one set of hieroglyphs describes a vicious defeat handed to the Snake King Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk, also known as Jaguar Fire, who’s artifact-dense tomb has also been found on the site.

The Snake King dynasty was also responsible for the large structures still standing at the site, with the most impressive of these being the magnificent Structure 2, a stepped temple that reaches 45 meters in height, about 148 feet, one of the largest in the Mayan world. It’s believed that for its time, Calakmul was one of the largest cities in the Americas, controlling the local trade of corn, squash, and sweet potato, which was sold in large markets near the city center.

Eventually, however, The Snake King dynasty came to an end, dwindling out along with their Tikal rivals during the Classic Maya Collapse, a time around the year 900 in which many civilizations in this area suddenly vanished.

Likewise, the final description of a Calakmul ruler dates to the year 909 on one of the last legible stelae. The city’s population began rapidly shrinking, dropping from a peak of at least 70,000 and falling until it had become little more than a ghost town, becoming an abandoned pilgrimage site that was occasionally visited over the next few hundred years, the area being reclaimed by nature and covered once again in dense vegetation, where it would lay hidden until Lundell’s journey in the 20th century.

But the story of discovery doesn’t end there. In 2022, researchers from the University of Calgary released even more stunning discoveries after they scanned the surrounding region using airborne LiDAR, a type of radar that allowed them to peer through the treetops and find hidden structures below. Surrounding Calakmul, they found what appeared to be at least 60 individual buildings, which they described as ‘immense apartment-style residential compounds’, the likes of which have never been found before in a Mayan culture, and indicate that there is certainly much more about the region that we’ve still yet to discover.

Ebla

In 1964, Italian archaeologists from the University of Rome began excavating near Mardikh, Syria, a village to the southwest of Aleppo. They’d been drawn to the region by an oddly large mound located in the desert there, and a few years into carefully digging and brushing their way down, they found a statue of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, with an inscription describing the king of Ebla. They now knew the name of the city they were excavating, a place that had been mentioned in the records of several other archaeological finds.

But nothing could have prepared the team for what awaited them. The more of Ebla they uncovered, the more they found that it was in pristine condition, nearly perfectly preserved by the sand and rock that had covered it since about 2500 BC, making it more than 4000 years old. In 1975, the team hit the archaeological jackpot when they discovered a palace, inside which were statues made of gold, lapis lazuli, and other precious materials, but the real treat was found in the throne room, where the team found fragments making up 2,500 complete cuneiform tablets, describing the city’s rulers, economy, history, war, and so much more. Finding the city’s archives, which had been placed in the throne room to spare them during the city’s collapse, gave the researchers an unparalleled view into a time when civilization was much younger.

Ebla was an incredibly rich city, with much of its income sourced from its rich agricultural lands to the north, where they grew crops like grapes, figs, pomegranates, and barley, along with raising cattle, sheep, and pigs. Outside this, Ebla controlled a conglomerate of 17 city-states, which provided the central power with raw materials such as timber, silver, tin, and gold.

All of these were manufactured before being traded with regional powers like Egypt, as well as various peoples in modern-day Iran, Iraq, and even as far away as Cyprus. But while these riches had brought Ebla to the heights of prosperity, they also brought on its downfall. The Akkadians launched several campaigns to sack Ebla and take its riches over the years, finally succeeding in the year 2240 BC, evidenced by the archaeological record of this time that the entire city was razed.

Following this was a couple hundred years of recovery, but upon restoring Ebla’s power, the city was destroyed once again in 1600 BC, leveled by the Hittites in a sacking from which the city would never recover. Following this, Ebla was abandoned, and lost to time until the Italian team rediscovered it around 50 years ago.

For decades following its discovery, Ebla was a site of intense archaeological discovery, as team after team continued to unearth tombs, artifacts, and tablets, and more, but excavating came to a sudden halt in 2011 at the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, which has had devastating effects on the historical site. After being captured by an opposition group known as the Arrows of the Right, Ebla was used as an elevated watch point to spot enemy aircraft. During this time, looting was rampant, and at one point an entire crypt full of human remains was uncovered, but sadly their bones were scattered into the desert as the looters searched for jewelry. It seems that it may be many years before work can resume on this rediscovered hub of ancient Mesopotamia, and hopefully when that time comes there will still be even more to learn.

Akrotiri

Located in a relatively small, Greek archipelago, the island of Santorini is one of the most famous vacation destinations in the entire world, with tourists drawn to its bright white houses, jagged cliffs, and picturesque water. But this wasn’t the case back in the 19th century, when it housed a population of just a few thousand people that mostly consisted of fishermen.

But soon enough, the history of this quaint island would be blown wide open. In 1867, a construction crew bumped into a few artifacts while digging in a quarry, catching the attention of a German archaeologist who investigated the scene a few years later. The site was named Akrotiri, and became of special interest to Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos, who began digging around in the late 1930s. Unfortunately, this digging had to be put on hold due to the outbreak of the Second World War, during which Greece was occupied by Germany, which was followed by the Greek Civil War which lasted until 1949.

After Greece had, mostly, settled down politically, Marinatos was able to finally get to work, with major excavations beginning in 1967, and this is when the true value of the site was revealed. Akrotiri was once a flourishing city, a center of hub for passing ships dealing in copper and gold. In fact, Akrotiri was so well off that they had paved roads, a rudimentary sewer system, and had high levels of specialization and expertise, leading to the creation of fine art and pottery.

The record indicates that Akrotiri prospered in this way perhaps for more than 500 years, before suddenly vanishing. The reason for this disappearance? The Theran Eruption, also called the Minoan Eruption, was a massively powerful event, and ranks among the most intense volcanic activity in human history.

The dust and rock that it ejected created noticeable effects in a radius of thousands of miles, being so disruptive to the Egyptians that they made several records of it, and even reaching the Chinese, who wrote at this time that they had a yellow sky and a summer frost.

But for Akrotiri, the consequences were much more than just a discolored sky. The city was destroyed, buried in an instant by thick layers of volcanic ash, the entire city essentially disappearing overnight.

But as catastrophic as this event was, much like what would later happen in Pompeii, the ash served to preserve the city it had buried, keeping its architecture and pottery largely intact for thousands of years. Among the greatest of these findings are Akrotiri’s frescoes, or wall paintings. Using colors such as red, blue, brown, and yellow, these pieces of art are not only immaculately preserved for their age, they also offer a unique glimpse into the life of a Minoan more than 4000 years ago, depicting boats, monkeys, and more. The most famous of these are the Spring Fresco, found almost perfectly intact in its original position, and the Ship Procession Fresco, showing people, boats, animals, and a coastal town.

Mohenjo Daro

During the birth of civilization, the Indus Valley was one of the premier places to be, a hotspot for thriving agricultural communities that would rise and fall over the years, making this region in south Asia one of the richest in the world for ancient artifacts.

In 1920, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India was summoned to inspect what appeared to be the ruins of one of these ancient civilizations. Upon arrival, he found enough evidence to convince him that the site was ancient, and authorized its excavation. The site was named Mohenjo Daro, or Mound of the Dead Men, and it would turn out to be a fantastic find from one of the world’s oldest cities.

After around 30 years of excavating involving teams from many different countries, it was found that Mohenjo Daro first rose to prominence around the year 3000 BC, and became one of the largest cities of the Harappan Civilization. At its peak, the city boasted an impressive population for the time, with a soft estimate of at least 50,000 people, though this number is certainly on the low end as we’ll see in a minute.

The city was highly organized, built up in a grid system with a central market. It featured two large assembly halls, covered street drains for flushing waste, and a huge public bath house. One building even had a bath with a furnace beneath it, suggesting a heated pool of some sort, perhaps one of the worlds earliest hot tubs. If you’re wondering where all the water came from for the large baths, look no further than the more than 700 wells found in the city.

There was also a massive granary with rooms for washing and others for drying the grain, and all sorts of industrial structures and specialized shops.

Interestingly, Mohenjo Daro seems to have had no wall of any sort, guarded instead by a series of watchtowers that surrounded it. These watchtowers are also where researchers got their first evidence that the city had a big problem with flooding. According to the leading theory, these occasional floods would bring in a layer of silt, which would cause the entire city to adjust its structures and rebuild them a tad higher. This may have happened six or seven times, with the final flood being so devastating that it was the reason the city was abandoned around 1600 BC.

Some of the more interesting artifacts recovered from Mohenjo Daro include a bronze statue dubbed the ‘Dancing Girl’, soapstone statues of priestly figures, and some of the world’s first rulers used for measuring length, which were made out of ivory.

But all this may be just a fraction of what’s actually there. Excavation has largely been stopped due to the damage of weathering on the exposed structures, but noninvasive techniques in recent years have indicated that there is much more waiting to be found. If the flooding-rebuilding theory is correct, its possible that what we’ve excavated is merely one of the many layers in this archaeological gem.

Key Takeaways

• Calakmul, a lost Mayan city, was rediscovered in the 1920s and contains significant structures and artifacts.
• Ebla, an ancient Mesopotamian city, was found in Syria in 1964, revealing extensive archives and wealth.
• Akrotiri, on the island of Santorini, was buried by a volcanic eruption and preserved, with notable frescoes.
• Mohenjo Daro, one of the oldest cities, had advanced infrastructure and was abandoned due to severe flooding.
• The rediscovery of these cities provides valuable insights into ancient civilizations and their ways of life.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: Incredible Rediscovered Lost Cities
• Hero image source by Elegantstickman / openverse, by.

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